A MYSTAGOGY OF MARY (Mystagogy VII)

Mary, Mother of God 

Jan. 1,  2022 STM, TORONTO

 

The Apostles together with the Blessed Virgin Mary, formed the Church, an indissoluble group surrounding the human life of Jesus. 

Mary’s fiat, her “yes” to God, is the foundation, the undergirding and the sustaining the Church which emanates from Jesus Christ, her Son. The Church finds her personal centre in Mary. Her faith response to the Divine Bridegroom complements the masculine principle and together they bear the fruit of Christ’s love for the world. 

 

Knowing that all people are envisaged in God's plan, the Church can humbly know herself as the chosen representative of mankind before God in faith, prayer, and sacrifice, in hope for all, and, still more, in love for all.

 

The highest priority of the Church belongs to our readiness to serve the divine love. Our “Yes” that has no other purpose.  Yet, this response to God appears senseless in a world caught up in what is thought to be urgent, reasonable and individualistic. This is a society in thrall to the dictatorship of relativism, the plague of self-referential gender fluidity and the mania for unlimited choice. Society slouches towards Sodom.   

 

St. Thomas Aquinas, in discussing Mary's fiat, saw that it was necessary to show the spiritual marriage between the Son of God and human nature.  Mary's "yes" stands for all God's people; making it possible for every person to pronounce their own personal fiat – Yes to God’s love.

 

Mary’s Immaculate Conception locates her personal existence between Heaven and human life in its fallen state. This is because her Immaculate Conception has freed her from any influence of sin. 

Yet, Blessed Mary lived her human existence in this fallen world of sin. Her personal life is situated at the passageway between the Old Covenant of Law and Sin and the New Covenant of Grace and Spirit.

 

Blessed Mary stands in direct continuity with the generations who descend from Abraham. As Virgin Mother, who became pregnant by her consent to the overshadowing Spirit; she signifies a new beginning. 

 

Finally, her existence lies in the tension between time and eternity. Although she herself has regained Paradise in her Assumption, as Mother of all the living she gives birth to the Messiah in the birth-pangs of the Cross." 

 

Mary's dramatic role emerges both from her centre – as Jesus’ Mother – the Mother of God — and from the whole range of her being, which embraces fallen and redeemed humanity. Her role is universal.

 

Two thousand years of Christian tradition bear witness to the abiding presence of the Mother of God at the heart and centre of the Church.    

Holy Mary, Mother of God pray for us now, and at the hour of our death.